Here the author of Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story and Across the Great Divide tells the scandalous, complex, and at times ribald story of how Big Oil handpicked an obscure Ohio senator, Warren G. Harding, to serve as our 29th president, and how his so-called "oil cabinet" made it possible for the oilmen to secure vast reserves—domes—that had been set aside for use by the U.S. Navy.

"This is a story that has it all—a Jazz Age background, a pleasure-loving president surrounded by booze and chorus girls, boomtown capitalists from the Wild West, [and] conniving politicians.... [The author has] a certain zest for Teapot's sordid comedy [and] delivers fresh, arresting portraits of the main players, some of them lovable rogues, others beady-eyed scoundrels."—NYTimes